Photos of 15 at: Annie Jacobsen. Operation Paperclip, 2014

• Werner Von Braun, an aerodynamics expert and Nazi SS officer who developed the V-2 rockets that were used to blitzkrieg London and Antwerp. The rockets were constructed using slave labor from the Dora concentration camp where 20,000 slave laborers were worked to death in the Mittelwerk complex. Von Braun and his team were the first recruits of Operation Paperclip. He described the decision to come to the United States as follows: “We despised the French, we were mortally afraid of the Soviets, we did not believe the British could afford us, so that left the Americans.” [Clarence Lasby, Project Paperclip, 1971] In the US he was the architect of the Saturn V rocket that took the Apollo to the Moon.

• Walter Dornberger, was in charge of V-2 weapons manufacture and deployment. The V-2 rocket factories, Dornberger was arrested by the British and held for two years on war crimes, deemed “a menace of the first order” when he was released into U.S. custody. Then, at the request of Von Braun to John McCloy, he was secretly brought to the U.S. where he became Chief, Army Weapons Dept. and Commander of V-2 rocket guided missile development; then f rom 1950 to 1965, he was director of R&D at Bell. He also had a role on the creation of the Space Shuttle and the world’s first guided nuclear air-to-surface missile. Following retirement, Dornberger went to Mexico and later returned to Germany, where he died in 1980.
• Arthur Rudolph, Operations Director of slave labor facility Nordhausen –Mittelwerk where at least 20,000 slave laborers who were forced to build V-2 rockets died having been starved, beaten, shot and hung. He was hired by the U.S. Army; became NASA’s top manager, and was known as the Father of the Saturn Rocket. In 1984, his past caught up with him; he was quoted by a reported stating: “I read Main Kampf and agreed with lots of things in it…Hitler’s first six years, until the war started, were really marvelous.” He moved back to West Germany, surrendered his American citizenship.
• Georg Rickhey, supervised the slave workers at Mittelwerk appeared as a defendant in the Dora (Nordhausen) war crimes trial. He also was known to instruct SS guards to club children to death at Dora. He was a defendant in the Nordhausen war crimes trial. He was hired by the US Army Air Forces.
• Erich Traub, a virologist, microbiologist and doctor of veterinary medicine who weaponized Rindepest (cattle plague) at Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler’s request. Paperclip contract with Naval Research Institute.
• Dr. Hubertus Strughold was in charge of the Aviation Medical Research Institute of the Reich Air Ministry who was sought for war crimes. In a 1946 memo by the staff at the Nuremberg Trials, he was listed as one of 13 “persons, firms or organizations implicated in some notorious Dachau concentration camp experiments.” The memo referenced the murderous hypothermia (freezing experiments) at Dachau and Auschwitz; and oxygen deprivation experiments conducted on children, ages 11 to 13, who were taken from a psychiatric facility to Dr. Strughold’s research institute where they were placed in a specially built chamber subjected to simulated altitudes of 20,000 feet. Dr. Strughold was hired by US Army Air Forces, Texas to head the School of Aviation Medicine; then promoted to become the director of the Dept. of Space Medicine, dubbed as America’s “Father of Space Medicine”. Read Lucette Lagnado, The Wall Street Journal, 2012
• Dr. Konrad Schafer, a physiologist and chemist who developed a process to separate salt from seawater in emergencies. Medical experiments at Dachau were based on the Schafer Process, was hired by US Army Air Forces, Texas.
• Dr. Kurt Blome, deputy health minister of the Third Reich, he was a bacteriological warfare and biological weapons expert with a long-standing interest in cancer-causing viruses. In 1942, he became director of a unit of the Central Cancer Institute, University of Posen (now Poland). Blome was an expert in aerosol transmission of malaria to humans; and he infected prisoners with plague in order to test vaccines. At Auschwitz he sprayed nerve agents—Tabun and Sarin from aircraft on prisoners. Blome was tried at Nuremberg and acquitted; it is widely believed that his acquittal was due to American intervention. Two months later CIA agents from Ft. Detrick interviewed him about germ warfare and he was hired by US. Army interrogation center at Camp King.
• Otto Ambros, Hitler’s favorite, most valuable chemical warfare adviser, co-discoverer of Sarin gas. Ambors was the director of the I.G. Farben slave labor factory at Auschwitz. IG Farben was the giant cartel of chemical and pharmaceutical companies that committed numerous war crimes; IG Farben manufactured of Zylkon, the poison gas used to murder millions of Jews. Ambros also invented synthetic rubber which was manufactured at another factory at Auschwitz working slave laborers to death. He was one of the last to leave Auschwitz after destroying evidence. He was convicted at Nuremberg of mass murder and slavery and sentenced to eight years in prison, but was granted clemency by High Commissioner John McCloy, who also restored his substantial wealth. Ambros was hired by the Dept. of Energy, the U.S. Army of Chemical Corps, and Dow Chemical. In 1954 Ambros was Chairman of the thalidomide advisory committee of Chemie Grünenthal during its development and then was an active member of the company’s board of directors.
• Richard Kuhn, a Nobel Prize winner whose expertise was the physiological action of nerve agents; he synthesized Soman, the most deadly of all Nazi nerve agents; he was the director of the Institute of Chemistry at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Medical Research in Heidelberg. As a Paperclip recruit he worked for the US Army Air Forces Aero Medical Center in Heidelberg and for General Louck’s Heidelberg working group on sarin production.
• Dr. Walter Schreiber, a Major General of the Wehrmacht, a prominent member of the Reich Research Council who introduced lethal phenol injections “as a quick and convenient means of executing troublemakers.” He worked closely with high ranking doctors who conducted freezing experiments at Auschwitz and chemical and bone experiments at Ravensbrueck where women’s legs were cut open and deliberately infected with gangrene, then having bone transplanted.  The experiments he presided over “usually resulted in a slow and agonizing death.” Those who survived were crippled for life. [Hunt, 1991]  Schreiber served as chief doctor at the military/ CIA notorious interrogation site in Germany, Oberursel, later renamed, Camp King. He was hired by US Air Force, School of Aviation Medicine, Texas. But following disclosure of documents linking him to the medical atrocities and the Nazi Euthanasia program, he was flown to Argentina in 1952.  The New York Times Nazi Whitewash, 1985.
• Dr. Theodor Benzinger, directed the Experimental Station of the Air Force Research Center under Hermann Goring, was an officer of the Stormtroopers. He was arrested, imprisoned at Nuremberg and listed as a defendant in the Doctors Trial, but mysteriously released and hired by the US Army Air Forces and the Naval Medical Research Institute, Md.
• Dr. Herman Becker-Freyseng, an aviation physiologist and former director of aeromedical research for the Nazi air force who oversaw medical experiments on prisoners at Dachau, was convicted at Nuremberg and sentenced to 20 years in prison for his murderous sea water experiments that killed the subjects. He hired by US Army Air Forces.
• Dr. Siegfried Ruff, directed the Aero Medical Division of German Experimental Station for Aviation Medicine: at Dachau he supervised medical murder experiments. Was tried at Nuremberg and acquitted, then hired by US Army Air Forces.
• Dr. Walter Schieber, SS-Brigadefuhrer, a chemist and engineer. He was head of the Reich Ministry of Armaments Supply; oversaw the underground engineering projects and designs for concentration camp armaments factories. As a chemist he conducted a “nourishment” experiment at Mauthausen concentration camp in 1943 designed to address the problem of food shortages for slave laborers: 150 slave laborers were denied their usual watery broth and were instead given an artificial paste designed by Schieber using pieces of used clothing. Of the 150 subjects, 116 died. A West German court determined that the deaths could not necessarily be “attributed to nutrition” because so many died of other causes in the camp. Schieber was the Speer ministry’s liaison to IG Farben who oversaw industrial production of tabun and sarin gas working with Otto Ambros. He was linked to possibly thousands of deaths from various chemical weapons experiments carried out at IG Farben’s production plants.
• Dr. Friedrich “Fritz” Hoffmann, a chemist for the Luftwaffe Technical Research Institute had conducted a myriad of poisonous chemical experiments on humans.  In the U.S. he was initially sent to Camp Detrick and Edgewood Arsenal where he continued to refine his research on lethal sarin and tabun gases for wartime objectives utilizing a specially constructed “gas chamber” to test the lethality of these gases in American servicemen.
• Dr. Herbert Bruno Gerstner, conducted untold number of experiments on “feeble minded children,” cancer patients and elderly– comparing wounds from burns and electrocution – prior to their being murdered in Hitler’s T-4 euthanasia program. He was recruited under Paperclip to conduct radiation experiments on behalf of the CIA and the Air Force at M.D. Anderson Hospital for Cancer in Texas. Gerstner’s patients never suspected that they were being administered an extreme amount of X-ray dosages that would eventually kill them.
• Major General Reinhard Gehlen, Hitler’s chief intelligence officer for the Eastern Front who organized a right-wing group of anti-Soviet Ukrainians and other Slavic nationalists into guerrilla units to fight the Soviets. Gehlen was also responsible for brutal interrogation of Soviet prisoners of war; he and his agents had committed some of the most notorious crimes of the war: they murdered—either executed, tortured or starved some four million Soviet prisoners.
• In May, 1945 Gehlen surrendered to the U.S. Army Counter Intelligence Corps in Bavaria with vast intelligence documents stored on microfilm.  In August Gehlen and three assistants were covertly flown to Washington where he was interviewed by both Military intelligence and OSS. He met with Bill Donovan, head of the OSS and Allen Dulles, (then) OSS station chief in Europe. During his interrogation he identified several OSS officers who were members of the Communist Party.
• In short order, Gehlen was appointed to oversee his vast network of intelligence agents to spy on the Soviet Union for the CIA. In 1949 Gehlen signed a $5 million a year contract with the CIA. His organization was given carte blanche to help Nazi war criminals out of Europe so they could escape prosecution.  He set up transit camps, “rat lines” an underground escape network, phony passports were issued allegedly by the CIA. Gehlen helped more than 5,000 Nazis escape from Europe and relocate in South and Central America. Mass murderers such as Klaus Barbie, the butcher of Lyons, France helped Fascist governments set up death squads in Chile, Argentina, El Salvador, and elsewhere.  Read more here and here